Taking Stock of the Forever War -- Mark Danner's exemplary analysis of the slowly unfolding train wreck that passes for the Bush Adminstration's Middle East foreign policy. Highly recommended for the breadth of its historical analysis and remarkably even-handed tone.

"The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic. But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops. By the spring of 2006, nearly every active-duty combat unit is likely to have been deployed twice. The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, make up an unprecedented 40 percent of the force, and the Guard is in the 'stage of meltdown,' as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, retired, recently told Congress. Within 24 months, 'the wheels are coming off.' For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft. In the end, the president judged his tax cuts more important than his vision of a 'democratic Middle East.' The administration's relentless political style, integral to both its strength and its weakness, left it wholly unable to change course and to add more troops when they might have made a difference. That moment is long past; the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative."

(Falling man photograph by Richard Drew. The most affecting 9/11 image I know, and one that I consequently reproduce here each year. Anyone claiming a conceptual disconnect between my reproduction of this image and the Mark Danner excerpt should first read Danner's long, finely argued article very carefully).
- posted by cjb @ 10:46 AM